Sentiance and the Innovation Centre i-KNOW will be entering a research and operational alliance, combining their expertise to create a partnership that is an innovation leader in the mobility, health, retail, safety and assisted ambient living industries.

12 MAY 2015, ANTWERP, BELGIUM

Sentiance announced today that it will be entering a research and operational alliance with the Innovation Centre i-KNOW of Ghent University, that will combine their expertise in mobile sensing, machine learning and intelligent mobility to create a partnership that is an innovation leader in next generation technology solutions in the mobility, health, retail, safety and assisted ambient living industries.

With the acquisition of i-KNOW’s MOVE intellectual property and platform specialized in spatio-temporal intelligence, Sentiance enhances its existing sensing and profiling technologies. The MOVE software, know-how and patents will broaden the capabilities of the Sentiance Context Suite to deliver intelligent insights for smart city applications.

The acquisition is intended to complement Sentiance’s mobile sensing and context-aware behavioral profiling solution and extends the company’s reach into the vast market of future living worldwide.

“The main driver for this acquisition is the MOVE Platform’s state-of-the-art mobility recommender,” shares Sentiance CEO Toon Vanparys.“The Sentiance platform sees plenty of traction in the smart mobility management industry, but to offer truly intelligent personalized solutions, we need to go beyond transport analysis and trip purpose prediction. We want to proactively suggest the best possible route for you. For example, when we know it is likely to start raining cats and dogs in the afternoon, you might be better off taking the bus to work that day. Even though you much prefer biking. Co-parenting might mean that you need to pick up the kids by car one week, but are free to experiment with alternative transport modes the other week. The fastest or cheapest route is not necessarily the most convenient one for you.”

Sentiance takes over development and industrialization of MOVE’s RouteCoach trip recommender, and will expand and commercialize the mobile application as a smart and human-centric mobility solution for fleet, transport and mobility management. It will allow for actual travel time and multimodal route planning and will give personalized trip suggestions that allow you to lose calories, or save time, money and the environment. Existing transport behavior patterns, your mobility attitude and preferences, flexible working times or parenting schedules and even stress can be factored in as well.

“Together with Sentiance, we will place the consumer central in mobility,” says Prof. Sidharta Gautama. “The system learns how different groups of people really behave and allows us to build personalized mobility solutions. On the other end, cities and organizations get real-time insight on how consumer groups gain or lose time in different transport modes, why and how they travel to certain places and which type of activities they prefer to combine. These insights allow to build modern mobility systems close to the consumer’s needs. However, the platform goes beyond simple observations. It is one of the first ICT-platforms to support citizen participation in policy making. This is the exciting bit of the technology. A city serves its suggestions to citizens, who can act or choose not to act on it, and together they shape what a city should look like. This dialogue is what truly makes a city smarter.”

Under the alliance, i-KNOW will be able to run these research projects on the Sentiance platform, offering its partners an industrial-grade, efficient and continuous solution for data collection, processing and disclosing.

About Sentiance

Sentiance unlocks contextual mobile experiences by mining sensor data on smartphones, wearables and connected devices. Sentiance enables companies worldwide to tap into a new level of mobile personalization and engagement. From mobile data to smart life.

i-KNOW is an innovation cluster at Ghent University that bridges research and the industry in intelligent information processing. i-KNOW incubates early-stage technology to set up partnerships with companies or launch new spin off companies. Today, i-KNOW consists out of 14 research groups and departments of UGent, 30 professors and in total over 300 researchers. It has incorporated five spin off companies in diverse sectors like mobile mapping, datacenter technology and biodata mining.

Relevant links

Quotes

"The main driver for this acquisition is the MOVE Platform’s state-of-the-art route recommender. The Sentiance platform sees plenty of traction in the smart mobility management industry, but to offer truly intelligent personalized solutions, we need to go beyond transport analysis and trip purpose prediction. We want to proactively suggest the best possible route for you.
For example, when we know it is likely to start raining cats and dogs in the afternoon, you might be better off taking the bus to work that day. Even though you much prefer biking. Co-parenting might mean that you need to pick up the kids by car one week, but are free to experiment with alternative transport modes the other week. The fastest or cheapest route is not necessarily the most convenient one for you."
Toon Vanparys, CEO at Sentiance

"Together with Sentiance, we will place the consumer central in mobility. The system learns how different groups of people really behave and allows us to build personalized mobility solutions. On the other end, cities and organizations get real-time insight on how consumer groups gain or lose time in different transport modes, why and how they travel to certain places and which type of activities they prefer to combine. These insights allow to build modern mobility systems close to the consumer’s needs.
However, the platform goes beyond simple observations. It is one of the first ICT-platforms to support citizen participation in policy making. This is the exciting bit of the technology. A city serves its suggestions to citizens, who can act or choose not to act on it, and together they shape what a city should look like. This dialogue is what truly makes a city smarter."
Quote Prof. dr. ir. Sidharta Gautama, i-KNOW Ghent University

About Sentiance

Powering the IOU - Internet of You

Sentiance is a data science company that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to analyze IOT sensor data in order to create a deep understanding of human behavior and context. Sentiance's clients use the platform to create new products and services that turn the Internet of Things into the Internet of You.